Once, the Cave had been airtight, accessed through a series of airlocks that still worked at the touch of a gloved, human hand. But even solid rock is porous over geological time. The air within this enormous chamber—radar probings had established that it was a spherical cavern half a kilometer across—had leaked out long ago. The air pressure inside now stood at a little below ten millibars, the temperature constant at minus fifteen degrees Celsius.
Alexander tried not to look down. The catwalk seemed impossibly frail, a spider’s web of black, interlacing threads woven into a deck that felt solid and metallic enough but was hard to see against the deeper black of the two-hundred-meter depths below. Ahead, a pale light—a white-yellow glow a meter across without visible source—illuminated the end of the catwalk; the only other light in the place came from the worklights mounted on the shoulders of his suit and from the telltales inside his helmet.
“Ten meters,” he said.
“Hold it, Aladdin. Can you pan for us?”
“Roger. Panning to the right.” Carefully, he turned himself in place, allowing the camera mounted on the outside of his helmet to relay the view across a full three-sixty. He could see nothing but black; the cavern swallowed his worklights in impenetrable darkness, but the camera would be picking up frequencies invisible to his eye. Perhaps they were enjoying a better view of things than he, back at the Team HQ.
Alexander thought of Howard Carter. On November 26, 1922, after a long dig and repeated disappointments, the British archeologist had chiseled a narrow hole through a stone door separating him from another world, in a long-sealed tomb in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. Air thirty centuries old, hot and stale, had gusted from the opening; a candle thrust through the hole flickered but remained lit, proving the air breathable.
Carter’s heart must have been pounding as hard as Alexander’s was now, his breathing as fast and as uneven, as he carefully enlarged the hole and peered through. The candle’s flame had been captured and flung back at him by myriad polished surfaces of pure gold.
“Can you see anything?” Lord Carnarvon, his partner and the expedition’s backer, has asked, close at his shoulder.
“Yes,” Carter had replied, his voice cracking with emotion. “Yes, wonderful things!”
Alexander knew now exactly what Carter must have felt as he first addressed that sealed, stone door leading to the tomb of Tutankhamen.
“Still not a lot to see,” the voice said over his headset, “even at IR freaks. Maybe this thing is a bust after all.”
Alexander refused to even consider the possibility. “I’m moving again. Eight meters.”
It could not be a bust. It couldn’t. So far, except for the automated controls on the airlock doors on the way in, there’d been no positive indication that there was anything inside this sealed, empty sphere worth exploring. Even so, Alexander had suggested the name Cave of Wonders in what was for him an atypically romantic whim; no one knew what they would find in the chamber, though speculation had ranged from living quarters for the transplanted humans who’d worked here, to some kind of operational center for the yet-unknown intelligences who’d brought early hominids to this place, to a starship, intact and filled with secrets buried these past five hundred millennia.
The last few steps toward the end of the catwalk, suspended high above an invisible floor and surrounded by darkness absolute, were the hardest steps David Alexander had ever taken. He was drawn on, however, by wonder and by Howard Carter’s ghost. Like Carter, he was standing at a doorway opening to another world.
But he still needed to find the key….
“Five meters,” he said. “I’m…I’m entering the lighted area now.” The sourceless glow seemed to hover above a widening in the walkway, a structure that reminded him, disconcertingly, of the harpoon gunner’s bowsprit platform on an old-time whaling vessel.
Light surrounded him. He raised his gloved hands, staring at the white material. St. Elmo’s fire danced from the fingertips, cold and otherworldly. His fingertips traced blue arcs in the air…
…and the cavern was no longer shrouded in blackness. From his vantage point, suspended near the center of that kilometer-wide chamber, it seemed as though he was in the middle of a perfectly spherical swarm of stars, each star rigidly locked with the geometric perfection of the other stationary stars around it. There were thousands of them, in orderly, regimented splendor. Fainter glows floated among the ranked stars, forming oddly regular sweeps and streaks and dots that might have been words, an alien script felt more than seen.
“Ah, Control,” he called, his breathing coming faster still. “Are you picking this up?”
“Roger that, Aladdin. We see…something, but we’re not sure what we’re seeing. What do you make of it?”
“I’m…not…sure….”
As he focused on one section of that far-off wall of stars, one marked by one of the alien-script words, it seemed as though one section of the spherical surface—twenty degrees, perhaps—broke off and rushed toward him, each star becoming a tiny, polished facet, like a jewel.
Or…like a display screen or monitor.
How was the illusion accomplished? Was he seeing something real? Or was it in his mind?
Alexander blinked, hard. Sweat was trickling down his face, tickling his nose and stinging his eyes, and he yearned to be able to reach up and wipe it away. His mouth felt as dry as the thin, dry vacuum of the Martian atmosphere. He was looking now at an array of tiny, rectangular TV screens, an array at least fifty rectangles wide and fifty high…or were they, in fact, tiny? He had no way of judging scale. They might have been the size of a thumbnail, suspended a few centimeters in front of his eyes, or the size of a theater’s holoscreen, each three stories tall. Without a frame of reference, there was no way to tell.
“Aladdin! We’re not seeing anything here. Can you describe what you’re seeing?”
The clear majority of those screens, he saw—perhaps two thousand of them or more—were blank. But on the others…
He picked out one that was alive with a reddish hue, straining to make out the scene he could just distinguish glowing in its depths. Abruptly, and silently, the screen expanded until it filled his field of vision.
“Aladdin!” the voice called, tinny in his ears. “Aladdin! Can you see anything?”
It took Alexander a long time to answer. “Yes,” he replied at last. “Wonderful things!…”
ONE
SATURDAY, 5 APRIL 2042
Ramsey Residence
Greensburg, Pennsylvania
1635 hours EST
“Okay, gorgeous. Let’s get you out of those clothes, first.”
“But, Jack…all of them? How far do you want me to go? I mean, I’m outside, and the neighbors might—”
“I want you naked, babe.” Not that the bikini top and tight, red slacks she was wearing now left all that much to the imagination. “Make yourself starkers. For me.”
John Charles Ramsey—he preferred the name Jack—leaned a bit closer as he watched the young woman on the flatscreen that dominated one wall of his room. She gave him a sultry pout, one filled with lust-churning promise, then started slowly unzipping her pants. She was lounging on a folding chaise next to an outdoor pool, where the sunlight turned her long hair to spun gold, and she had to wiggle a bit to get the slacks down off her hips. Jack licked his lips once, then